Twelve days have gone by since the Big Giveaway of ‘A Construct of Angels’ and as promised, I’m typing a few lines of feedback to let you know if I thought it was all worthwhile.

Before the giveaway, ‘Construct’ had sold eighteen copies. That wasn’t a problem – I’d always imagined that my first novel would be a slow seller. As I’ve told many people, I didn’t buy any of Robin Hobb’s books until she’d written six of them. The first Harry Potter book I considered buying was ‘The Goblet of Fire’ – book four in the series. E E ‘Doc’ Smith had written seven Lensman books before I ever laid eyes upon them. Robert Heinlein, Arthur C Clarke, Andre Norton…all the same.

So I wasn’t expecting a stampede.

The weekend of the giveaway arrived – December 1st and 2nd. I watched with barely-restrained anxiety. Would anybody bother? I’d Tweeted, I’d Facebooked, I’d emailed, I’d reTweeted, I’d told KindleBoards plus everyone who knew I’d published. What more could I do at this early stage in my self-publishing career? Ryan Casey had warned me to expect hundreds of downloads. I saw twenty. I stared at my tiny Netbook screen, waiting for the numbers to change, but they remained steadfastly low. I refreshed. Nothing changed. I logged out and back in again. Still no change.

It wasn’t until I realised that my Netbook was only displaying part of the Amazon KDP screen that the true scale of what had just happened hit me.

So, to say that word got around would be something of an understatement. With only Twitter, Facebook, Kindleboards, this blog and my contact list to work from, at least a thousand people had received the message that ‘Construct’ was up for grabs.

I’m happy to report that the first part of the exercise has been, without any shadow of doubt, a big success.

Now I can only wait and hope that the main object of the exercise, the procurement of some useful feedback, will bear fruit. Even if only 5% of the readers leave positive feedback, that would still be forty reviews to strengthen ‘Construct’s credibility.